May 27, 2014

Well, what can I say for the week... it was a different week. We tried to see the people we have found and are teaching, we are just short of a teaching pool. We used a lot of the time this week to pump members up about an Apostle, namely Elder Holland, coming in two weeks. They have a hard time seeing its importance! Why!? So with that we talked about temples and member missionary work. So many people thinking kay.. we are getting a Stake, soon a temple.. not realizing they need 300 more people in each ward! Long ways to go for the temple. Really opened some eyes.  Some are excited, but others are still hesitant on jumping aboard the missionary life train! We started to make family missionary plans in each of the 11 households we visited and we are role playing and teaching more about approaching people with the gospel in Relief Society class and yw/ym this next Sunday! We got some sweet things going on. Yes, it’s still not easy but tings gwan mi boss! Really excited to be a part of this branch, kick starting in their work and so cool that the Peart family (our branch mission leader family) is leading it all! 8 referrals from them this week. It can be done, all we have to do is take a leap of faith and Open Your Mouth! The baptisms have been slow and it frustrates me a bit, but only the Lord can judge our success as being put out at 100% or not. So many good things we can be doing. Also, in gospel principles this Sunday, we learned about repentance. One good friend commented on there really only being 2 types of sins as we discussed mosiah 5:2  1)sins of commission- the thou shalt not  2) sins of omission- thou Shall do. We usually focus a lot on thou shalt nots.. but in reality we sin in omission as well. If we did the thou shalts, we wouldn't have time to do the thou shalt nots! Pretty straight forward. 

But to get to some sweet details of the week, lets see what I can remember...

We had a sweet lesson with Shacha (Georgias daughter) on importance of the Book of Mormon. In studies Saturday morning, I had a sweet impression come to mind. We had left Alma 32 for her to read. We took a few of the key words in that chapter and flipped them to be compatible with our lesson plan. We changed 4 words: seed=book of mormon, tree= book of mormon (same seed grows same tree) nourish=read and fruit=blessings. There is an assignment for you -  replace those four words and let me know how you feel about that. We didn’t teach many lessons this week, but I feel the Lord is trusting us more. I have had the best studies and preparations for lessons I probably have had the whole mission. We were kinda in ignorance when we got here, but now for the Lord to open up doors we gotta pick up our game! Super stoked for this next week as we begin to work more united with the members cuz definitely nothing is going to happen tell we are tight like a dish with the members. Well, we are off to the zoo! Hopefully we will have some sweet pics for next week! Love you all so much! Bless up! 

Elder WIlkerson